Ideology and inquisition the world of the censors in early Mexico

This book is the first comprehensive treatment in English of the ideology and practice of the Inquisitional censors, focusing on the case of Mexico from the 1520s to the 1630s. Others have examined the effects of censorship, but Martin Nesvig employs a nontraditional approach that focuses on the inner logic of censorship in order to examine the collective mentality, ideological formation, and practical application of ideology of the censors themselves. Nesvig shows that censorship was not only about the regulation of books but about censorship in the broader sense as a means to regulate Catholic dogma and the content of religious thought. In Mexico, decisions regarding censorship involved considerable debate and disagreement among censors, thereby challenging the idea of the Inquisition as a monolithic institution. Once adapted to cultural circumstances in Mexico, the Inquisition and the Index produced not a weapon of intellectual terror but a flexible apparatus of control

Promiscuous Power An Unorthodox History of New Spain

Scholars have written reams on the conquest of Mexico, from the grand designs of kings, viceroys, conquistadors, and inquisitors to the myriad ways that indigenous peoples contested imperial authority. But the actual work of establishing the Spanish empire in Mexico fell to a host of local agents-magistrates, bureaucrats, parish priests, ranchers, miners, sugar producers, and many others-who knew little and cared less about the goals of their superiors in Mexico City and Madrid. Through a case study of the province of Michoacán in western Mexico, Promiscuous Power focuses on the prosaic agents of colonialism to offer a paradigm-shifting view of the complexities of making empire at the ground level. Presenting rowdy, raunchy, and violent life histories from the archives, Martin Austin Nesvig reveals that the local colonizers of Michoacán were primarily motivated by personal gain, emboldened by the lack of oversight from the upper echelons of power, and thoroughly committed to their own corporate memberships. His findings challenge some of the most deeply held views of the Spanish colonization of Mexico, including the Black Legend, which asserts that the royal state and the institutional church colluded to produce a powerful Catholicism that crushed heterodoxy, punished cultural difference, and ruined indigenous worlds. Instead, Nesvig finds that Michoacán-typical of many frontier provinces of the empire-became a region of refuge from imperial and juridical control and formal Catholicism, where the ordinary rules of law, jurisprudence, and royal oversight collapsed in the entropy of decentralized rule

Promiscuous Power An Unorthodox History of New Spain

Scholars have written reams on the conquest of Mexico, from the grand designs of kings, viceroys, conquistadors, and inquisitors to the myriad ways that indigenous peoples contested imperial authority. But the actual work of establishing the Spanish empire in Mexico fell to a host of local agents-magistrates, bureaucrats, parish priests, ranchers, miners, sugar producers, and many others-who knew little and cared less about the goals of their superiors in Mexico City and Madrid. Through a case study of the province of Michoacán in western Mexico, Promiscuous Power focuses on the prosaic agents of colonialism to offer a paradigm-shifting view of the complexities of making empire at the ground level. Presenting rowdy, raunchy, and violent life histories from the archives, Martin Austin Nesvig reveals that the local colonizers of Michoacán were primarily motivated by personal gain, emboldened by the lack of oversight from the upper echelons of power, and thoroughly committed to their own corporate memberships. His findings challenge some of the most deeply held views of the Spanish colonization of Mexico, including the Black Legend, which asserts that the royal state and the institutional church colluded to produce a powerful Catholicism that crushed heterodoxy, punished cultural difference, and ruined indigenous worlds. Instead, Nesvig finds that Michoacán-typical of many frontier provinces of the empire-became a region of refuge from imperial and juridical control and formal Catholicism, where the ordinary rules of law, jurisprudence, and royal oversight collapsed in the entropy of decentralized rule

The Epistemological Politics of Vernacular Scripture in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

The year 1577 was a watershed for linguistic politics in Mexico. After more than five decades in Mexico, the Spanish crown signaled a break from its previous tolerance of the use of indigenous language in catechesis and doctrinal publications. The landmark case is the crown's confiscation of Bernardino de Sahagún's Historia General in 1577. Simultaneously, the Mexican Inquisition pursued an assault on vernacular Scripture, confiscating dozens of Spanish scriptural editions, and culminating in the Inquisition's prohibition of Nahuatl and other indigenous-language translations of Scripture, in particular Ecclesiastes and the Epístolas y Evangelios (Epistles and Gospels). Also central was the second trial of a noted Erasmian, Alonso Cabello, who had spent much of the same year in house arrest in Tlatelolco. All this came on the heels of the establishment of the Holy Office in Mexico in November 1571 and its first full-scale purge of prohibited books, including well over 200 editions of Scripture—dozens of them in Spanish and a few in Nahuatl—that had circulated freely in Mexico. Prior to the 1570s exico had witnessed intense debates about the role of language in missionary projects, in catechesis, and in the education of indigenous Mexicans, alongside those regarding the proper language for Scripture and devotional works

Introduction

Horace observed that “a word once uttered can never be recalled.”¹ In 1552 the jurist Diego de Simancas—a member of the General Council of the Spanish Inquisition, bishop of Ciudad Rodrigo, hater and prosecutor of the archbishop of Toledo, Bartolomé Carranza—stole this line from Horace and concluded that “books of heretics must be sent to the fire … because they can endure for centuries and infect those that come after their publication. And while the voices of heretics can only fill a city, books can pass from region to region, from kingdom to kingdom.”² Simancas expressed a centuries-ol